Jonathan Wateridge

The celebrated painter Jonathan Wateridge challenges the viewer to consider what is real and what is not via the construction of elaborate fictions with visible seams. Here, he talks about the inspiration for one of his most recent paintings, which depicts a moment between a film crew and the actors on the set of a fictional movie.

Jonathan Wateridge: The corpse in The Architect's House was inspired in part by William Mulholland, after whom the famous Drive is named. He was a civil engineer in the 1920s and built the St Francis Dam that collapsed in 1928, killing hundreds of Californians. The notion of an architect or engineer having an ultimately tragic relation to the layout or infrastructure of a city resonated with me.
This painting belongs to a series of seven images showing the narrative and production of a fictional film of my imagining, which centres on an unseen catastrophe that occurs within Los Angeles. The subject of The Architect's House is a moment of failure in the enactment of that narrative: the corpse is corpsing in the theatrical sense of the word and the accompanying laughter of his fellow performers adds to the disruption. I enjoy the Brechtian notion that within a theatrical context the only reality lies in the performing of the text and not in its subject. Having said that I don't want the images to be too knowing or ironic. I think a fiction is more revealing if you're able to buy into it first. I hope that the viewer is able to establish a genuine relationship with the figures depicted which then becomes disturbed by revealing the underlying construction, like a ventriloquial movement of the lips.

Interview by John-Paul Pryor 

Jonathan Wateridge's solo exhibition Another Place opens June 4 at The Tramshed, 6-8 Garden Walk, Shoreditch, London, EC2A 3EQ

John-Paul Pryor is Arts & Culture Editor at Dazed Digital and writes for Dazed & Confused, TANK, Another and The Quietus His debut novel Spectacles will be published in 2010 by Seabrook Press